One question for each 2026 World Cup team. Turkiye has three of the best players in the world. Does anyone know they are a good team?
Would you love me in a Bentley? Would you love me on a $95 bus from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium? Footnote is asking 48 questions, and they’re all about the 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup. This post is part of our Group D preview. You can also read previews of the United States, Paraguay, and Australia.
Turkiye has three of the best players in the world. Does anyone know if they are a good team?
In the not-so-distant past, Turkiye had a reputation as a sort of fool’s gold dark horse, the kind of team lots of pundits and experts pointed to as a squad that could make some noise at a tournament but inevitably disappointed.
This reputation was built in part through a boom or bust start to the 21st century: Since the the year 2000, Turkiye have managed two third-place finishes at major tournaments: The 2002 World Cup and the 2008 Euros. Outside of that, however, they have either failed to qualify or been eliminated in the group stage.
That reputation was crystallized by a disastrous Euro 2020 campaign. In the leadup to the weird pan-European post-lockdown tournament, pundits widely highlighted Turkiye as a team that could make a significant impact. What unfolded instead was what the BBC quantified as the fifth-worst showing in Euros history: three losses, eight goals conceded, and just a solitary goal scored.
Since that nadir, things have normalized, and Turkiye have performed somewhat like a normal, competent international team. They narrowly missed out on qualifying for the 2022 World Cup, losing to Portugal in the playoffs, and followed that with a strong run to the quarterfinals at Euro 2024.
Those European championships also served as an international football coming out party for Arda Güler, a budding Turkish superstar who announced himself to the world stage with a gorgeous strike from distance to win a wild match against Georgia.
The presence of Güler might be the biggest difference between the fake-good Turkiye of 2021 and the potentially-actually-good Turkey of 2026. Güler is a genuinely special player. Initial media coverage was desperate to describe him as the “Turkish Messi,” mostly because you are contractually obligated to describe any promising left-footed attacker as the Messi of whatever place they happen to be from, but over the course of his time at Real Madrid, he has emerged as more of a midfield-adjacent player. Xabi Alonso briefly tried deploying him as a deeper midfielder, and even after Alonso was forced out, Güler played mostly as an attacking midfielder or even on the left side of a 4-4-2. Güler is a skillful dribler and passer, and Real Madrid have relied on him more for moving the ball up the field and creating chances than scoring goals, although he is still capable as a more pure attacker.
Güler’s all-around attacking skills make him a prime candidate to thrive in the less controlled environment of international football. He has the exact skillset to be a classic, take control of the game, international number 10.
But the real difference for Turkiye is Güler isn’t the only rising player they have that can thrive in the international game.
The other young star is Kenan Yıldız. Born just three months after Güler, Yildiz has emerged alongside his compatriot as one of the brightest young talents in Europe. A powerful runner with the ball, and a capable shooter and passer with both feet, Yildiz became Juventus’s best attacker almost from the moment he debuted in 2023.
Meanwhile, after a career that seemed defined by false starts, Hakan Çalhanoğlu is now a veteran and one of the best midfielders in Europe. In particular, Çalhanoğlu has been one of the best set piece takers in the world over his half decade with Inter Milan, yet another skill that takes on outsized importance in international football.
The problem when evaluating Turkiye’s wider chances is that outside of those three truly excellent players, the team is not close to as talented. Particularly on defense, they are largely reliant on guys from midtable European teams or dudes who are not quite the most important player on one of the big Turkish Süper Lig teams.
They also proved themselves still capable of the occasional poor performance over the course of qualifying, finishing second in their group largely by virtue of a comprehensive 0-6 loss away to Spain.
But at risk of falling into the same trap that so many Turkiye-watchers have fallen into over the last quarter century, what they have is a truly high ceiling — three players who are capable of changing a game in a moment.
If the rest of the team will provide the foundation from which Güler and Yildiz can elevate from rising talents to fully-arrived stars, Turkiye might be a genuine dark horse after all.
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